Google Assistant Will Soon Be on 1 Billion Devices, Growing From 500 Million Last May

The voice-based virtual assistants may not have the same level of presence at this year’s CES as the last year, but that hasn’t stopped Google from boasting about its own digital assistant. The company on Monday revealed that Google Assistant will soon be present on one billion devices, up from 500 million last May. Comparatively, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is currently available on just 100 million devices, the Seattle-based company had revealed recently.

According to a blog post by Google, the active user base of Google Assistant grew four-times over the past year and it is expected to reach one billion devices by the end of this month. It is important to note here that a massive chunk of these one billion devices are the Android phones, which pretty much always come with the Google voice assistant pre-installed. Amazon’s Alexa, which is the other major digital assistant in the market that’s also available on third party devices, doesn’t have a similarly massive platform to take advantage of. Amazon had revealed the Alexa user base to The Verge last week.

In addition to this impending massive milestone, Google has also announced that voice assistant is now available in a total of 80 countries and 30 languages, up from 14 countries and eight languages last year. The search giant also remarked that it was another record holiday period for the Google Home devices and the company sold millions of these devices, however it has not divulged a specific sales number.

Google also notes that the digital assistant is now compatible with 10,000 smart home devices from 1,600 brands globally. This number grew 600 percent over the past year. The Mountain View-based company also introduced an experimental Assistant feature in US in the same period. The feature, which is powered by Duplex technology, is currently available to select Pixel phone users and helps them in completing tasks on the phone, like booking a table in a restaurant.